


the stillness the dancing

by bluebeholder



Series: One and the Same [9]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bipolar Anders (Dragon Age), Caretaking, Complicated Relationships, Depression, M/M, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24093502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: Summer, 9:37 Dragon.Troubles of the soul come at inconvenient times. One can't escape them, even when trying to conduct a revolution. Fenris is left picking up the pieces while Anders suffers an extreme bout of melancholy, and makes a startling discovery about his lover.
Relationships: Anders/Fenris (Dragon Age)
Series: One and the Same [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1654444
Comments: 8
Kudos: 73





	the stillness the dancing

**Author's Note:**

> **Heed the tags.** This was messy just for me to _write_ , I’d like everyone to stay safe while reading. <3
> 
> Please also remember that Fenris, while sympathetic, is…pretty spectacularly shit at handling mental health issues. He cares a _lot_ , but he doesn’t know the right words to say, and has very little experience with these matters in general. He’s a little clumsy with this one and will not use the most tactful language or respond in an ideal way. Didn’t quite know how to tag for THAT, so…consider this a bonus warning!

Anders hasn’t spoken to anyone all day.

It’s been a fortnight of this. Fenris is _out_ of ideas for how to help. He’s taken over most of Anders’ regular duties and then some. On top of managing watch schedules, supply trips, upkeep of defensive measures around their camp, and contact with their people in the Mage Underground, Fenris is now handling concerns from the mages, attempting to mediate arguments, and ensuring that necessary tasks such as cooking, laundry, latrine upkeep, and so on are done in a timely manner.

At need, Fenris has informally appointed Ornek, Maris, and Alina, as his seconds. People listen to Ornek because of his stern manner and imposing mercenary presence, to Maris because of her old age and wisdom, and to Alina because of her clear thinking.

With their new authority, things run a bit more smoothly even without Anders. Ornek takes over watch schedules and defensive measures, Maris regulates camp conduct and chores, and Alina manages arguments and concerns. Fenris spends his time running between the three of them and taking care of anything that they can’t.

They have three more mages now, one of whom is a young hedge mage from the Anderfels who fled her country with her husband when Templars came too close, and another of whom is a Dalish boy taken by force from his clan into a Circle, rescued by his two older sisters. Their camp has grown enough that Fenris is contemplating ordering a move elsewhere, but until Anders returns to them they’re in stasis. Still, Fenris takes the time to plan for camp breakdown if and when they go, for how they’ll cover their tracks and leave no clues for their destination.

He has to do _something_ , since he can’t seem to help Anders.

It’s not as if Fenris didn’t know this about his lover. There were times in Kirkwall when Hawke would sharply wave off questions about Anders’ absence—“he’s unwell”—and Fenris eventually learned that this meant unwell in mind, not in body. At the time, he’d brushed it off as just one more facet of the mage’s weakness.

As they’d grown closer, sharing their cat, he had gotten a more personal look at how melancholy affected Anders. Fenris learned that it was not weakness. He’d come to understand, and quietly admire, the strength it took for Anders to carry on when his own mind and heart warred against him.

Even then, though, Anders had hidden much of his struggle from Fenris. It’s only now, four months after their flight from Kirkwall, that Fenris has become privy to exactly the depths which Anders’ melancholy reaches. He almost wishes they were depths that had remained unplumbed.

This has come despite their success in Starkhaven with reestablishing the Mage Underground, despite the discovery of allies, despite the arrival of new mages and supplies. Anders has gotten letters out to contacts he hopes will help them, from as far away as Orlais, should the letters arrive. They have real news now, not gotten by hearsay in taverns and markets, and it’s good.

Yet Anders has descended further and further into melancholy. Fenris hasn’t been able to help him. He can only stand by and watch helplessly as Anders withdraws.

In all of it, this is the first day that Anders hasn’t even gotten out of bed.

As evening draws in, Fenris approaches the tent he shares with Anders. Quietly, Fenris unlaces the tent flap and ducks inside, checking to make sure that he indeed brought the waterskin along. It’s dark, as Anders prefers, but Fenris’ eyes are already adjusted to the night, and nothing is out of place in the tent. He can see Anders’ silhouette on one of their pushed-together camp cots, lying on his side; he can hear Anders breathing.

“Hello, Fenris,” Anders says, when Fenris sits down on his side of the makeshift bed. The straw mattress crackles softly as he turns over. Despite having moved so little today, Anders’ voice is tired.

Fenris starts stripping off his armor, stretching himself out as he goes. He already stretched thoroughly outside, but it will do him good to work out the kinks left behind by the armor. “Anders.”

“Everything all right out there…?”

It takes Fenris a moment to bite back the stinging retort he wants to throw out— _you’d know if you bothered to get up and find out_ —and he disguises his pause with a muttered curse as he tugs a stuck buckle free. “Fine,” he says at last.

He can’t sort through the mix of frustration and worry he feels toward Anders right now. Right now, Fenris is swinging more toward frustration—but he spent most of the day _worried_. It’s not an easy line to walk.

“I’m sorry,” Anders says after a moment. His voice is so dull, _absent_. “I’ll do better tomorrow.”

Fenris looks down at him. In Anders’ voice, Fenris hears the unpleasant echo of people he’s seen beaten for failures beyond their control. Worry pushes frustration aside. “I’ve told them all you’re ill,” he says, for lack of anything better.

Anders sighs. “I am ill. Sick in the head.” The faintest hint of disgust.

Carefully, Fenris feels for Anders’ face, and for his hair, so that he might run his fingers through it. It’s down, of course, an untidy, tangled mess. “You should be appalled, treating yourself so poorly when you yourself are a healer,” Fenris says. The words are stern, but he can’t make his tone at all stern. “No food, no sun…”

“I couldn’t eat, Fenris,” Anders says.

“Anders—”

“I _couldn’t_.”

It’s almost a snarl, and were Anders not in such a pitiable state Fenris might have replied in kind. As it is, he merely inclines his head. “Will you at least take water?”

For a long moment, Anders pauses. “Yes,” he says finally.

It takes Fenris a moment to find and light their small lantern. It’s a fine object, a gift from Aulbarrow’s reeve after Fenris rescued his fool of a son from bandits. It’s not merely a candle-holder of perforated tin but a proper silver lantern, with windows of thin-scraped horn. Because Fenris has never pretended _not_ to like the finer things in life, he has also spent a bit extra for beeswax instead of tallow candles, to avoid the smell.

The lantern fills the tent with soft, dim light, almost golden through the horn windows. It casts bars of shadow, but they’re familiar, a landscape Fenris knows well. He turns back to the cots to see Anders sitting up, running his fingers through his hair and smoothing it down. Anders is down to his undershirt, overlong sleeves half-covering his hands, wrapped to the waist with a blanket.

“You,” Fenris informs him, “look atrocious.”

“Spare my vanity, why don’t you,” Anders mutters, scrubbing at his face with his hand.

Fenris picks up the waterskin and passes it to Anders, sitting back down on the bed. He waits for Anders to take a few deep drafts before speaking. “This can’t go on.”

Anders passes the skin back to Fenris, looking down at the blankets. “I know,” he says, hands lax in his lap. He sounds only defeated, the way Fenris has heard him very few times before. “It will pass.”

“And while we wait for it to pass, there are people relying on us,” Fenris says.

He tries to speak gently, but Anders flinches like he’s taken a blow. “I’m sorry,” he says again, without looking up.

Fenris reaches out and takes Anders’ hand in his. “You had spoken of…”

He pauses. His fingers brush over Anders’ wrist as he lifts Anders’ hand from the bed, and by the feel of it there are _bandages_ wrapped around his wrist, hidden by his sleeve. Fenris pushes back the long sleeve to see neat wrappings there, and when he turns Anders’ hand over, there are faint, drying bloodstains on the inside of his wrist.

“I knew I forgot something,” Anders says, with the kind of tired wryness he usually reserves for making jokes about the Circle.

“Venhedis…what is this?” Fenris meets Anders’ eyes without letting go of his hand.

In the lanternlight, Anders looks almost serene, honey eyes meeting Fenris’ gaze without a trace of shyness or shame. “I’m only sorry I forgot to take care of it before you returned.”

“You would have _hidden_ this from me?”

“It was an accident,” Anders says. He half shrugs.

Fenris wonders how it’s possible for him to feel at once so panicked at Anders’ circumstance and so stunned at his cavalier attitude. “How is this an _accident_!?”

“One too many guilty thoughts, and there you go…” Anders sighs. “Old habit I fell into in…in solitary, that year I was there. Lucky I didn’t start where the Templars could see me, I’d have gotten executed as a maleficar. I can go months, years, without it now, but…today it slipped in around the back when I wasn’t looking for it.”

“Heal it,” Fenris says, grip tightening on Anders’ hand.

Anders shakes his head. “It will heal on its own,” he says. “Might not even scar.”

“ _Anders_.”

“Fenris,” Anders says. He raises his other arm a little, the sleeve falling back. “I just told you. It’s an old habit. I know what I’m doing.”

He’d seen the scars before, of course, but Anders had laughed them off as cat scratches, as magical mishaps, as some other excuse. Now, the littering of faded scars on his wrist _terrifies_ Fenris. He feels his jaw working, unsure of what to say, or do, in the face of…this.

“I’m all right,” Anders says.

“You’re _bleeding_ ,” Fenris whispers.

At that, Anders finally looks away. “I might…have a poor definition of ‘all right’.”

Fenris isn’t sure what to say. He feels that anything he says will be the wrong thing, but he can’t stay silent. Looking at Anders, defeated and ashamed of things Fenris can’t begin to fathom, _hurts_.

“Come here?” he asks at last.

Anders does. He leans into Fenris, head on his shoulder, long arms wrapping tight around Fenris’ waist. Fenris returns the embrace, holding Anders close, cheek pressed to the top of his head. Anders is warm, breathing, _alive_. For now, it’s enough.

He’s a heavy weight in Fenris’ arms. Though he usually looks like a ragged scarecrow wearing the feathers of its foes in his ill-fitting clothes, thin from years of poor food and overwork, Anders is solidly built, tall and broad in the shoulders. It’s easy for Fenris to forget.

Absentmindedly, Fenris smooths a hand down the long line of Ander’s spine, pressing the rumpled undershirt flat. He gets a soft, almost contented, sigh in response. Almost imperceptibly, Anders relaxes.

Stress like this always makes Fenris’ lyrium brands hurt worse. Combined with the weight of Anders on him, the pain of the brands on his chest and upper arms is close to unbearable. He grits his teeth, intending to endure, until Anders shifts and sends a spike of sharp pain straight through Fenris’ chest. At his flinch, Anders draws back.

“I’m—”

“Mage, if you apologize again, I _will_ throw you in the creek,” Fenris says.

Anders lets out a startled laugh, the mirth lingering around his eyes after the moment passes. “I put an elbow somewhere I shouldn’t have, didn’t I,” he says.

The sudden relief as Anders moves releases tension Fenris hadn’t known he was carrying. He manages a small smile, pushing his fingers through Anders’ hair gently. He doesn’t reply directly to Anders, but the statement was rhetorical anyway. “Lie down,” he says.

“Places to go?” Anders asks, gaze dropping away again.

Careful, Fenris presses his palm to Anders’ cheek. “No, I merely wish us both to be more comfortable,” he says. He kisses Anders’ forehead. “Let me get the light.”

Sometimes, Fenris still dreams of his comfortable bed back in Kirkwall. Musty as it had been, it was softer and more pleasant than these clean-but-prickly straw tick mattresses everyone sleeps on in their camp. Still, that bed was empty. This one has Anders, and is therefore a vast improvement.

They curl together, side by side. Almost four months together, sleeping side by side every night, and it still feels unfamiliar to Fenris. He will never get used to Anders’ warmth, his habit of nearly shoving Fenris off beds and out of bedrolls in his sleep, his persistent nightmares and the sleep-talking that accompanies them. But it’s an unfamiliarity he likes.

He feels Anders’ breath warm against his chest, where Anders tucks under Fenris’ chin. Anders has his arm draped loosely over Fenris’ side, while Fenris traces idle abstract patterns on Anders’ shoulder. It’s much more comfortable like this.

“Shana took over my watch,” Fenris says after a while. Shana is one of their newest arrivals, a Dalish woman who’s a better archer than Sebastian ever was. “I won’t leave you tonight.”

“Thank you, love.”

A rustling sound from the cat flap other side of the tent alerts them to the entrance of the one who is—in her own estimation—the most important personage in the whole camp. There’s a moment of silence, and then the mattress sinks a little as Libertas leaps up on it. The small gray cat manages to step on every tender spot Fenris has on her way to settle behind Anders’ back, her favorite sleeping spot.

“Hello there,” Anders murmurs, and Fenris can hear him smiling.

After a moment, her purring adds a steady counterpoint to the chirping of crickets outside the tent. Someone in another tent coughs; out by the cooking fire there is the indistinct murmur of voices and the clear sound of the mage Brithari’s laugh. Anders’ breathing is steady and slow, deep enough to hint that he’s nearly asleep. Otherwise, all is quiet.

Tomorrow, they’ll speak of all this more, Fenris promises himself. He will get to the bottom of this trouble, do something more to help Anders. Things can’t go on this way.

But for now, Fenris is content to simply be here with his lover.


End file.
